The Butcher getting in to the Festive Spirit!

I’m putting together some short healer-based posts for each of the bosses in the Highmaul raid tier. Hopefully they’ll be useful for some fellow healers (my focus is on restoration shaman as that is what I play). Let me know what you think!

(Read the Kargath Bladefist post here)

The Butcher

The Butcher is a skippable boss, but is the second boss you see in Highmaul. As always, Wowhead have an amazing guide for the fight which I strongly recommend checking out. Especially check out the tl;dr info for each class towards the end – it’s got the straight forward basics for each spec that is incredibly helpful. (I’m not going to go through kill strats here – everyone does this a bit differently

Healing this fight is awesome. The fight overall is definitely a dps check, but at the same time if healers can’t keep the dps alive you won’t get the kill. It’s fast and it hurts. 

Talents and glyphs
Without a doubt,  Conductivity is hands down the level 75 talent to have –  there is no movement and there are always groups stacked in melee getting smashed on, so Healing Rain shines. I use High Tide for my level 100 talent to make the most of my Chain Heal (and you will need to Chain Heal!) . 

If you’re a bit squishy and struggling to stay alive from bounding cleave, take Astral Shift for your level 15 talent. 

By default I’m using Echo of the Elements as my level 60 talent. I seem to have a lot of luck with it proccing, and can spam Riptide all day every day. This is particulaly useful for this fight, though, for getting the most out of the High Tide talent. 

For glyphs, it’s up to you – I personally don’t feel there are any super compulsory glyphs to use. Having said, you will find that Glyph of Healing Wave will be useful for keeping yourself topped up. 

Restoration shaman strat
This will depend on how your team does this fight. However it goes without saying that you will have groups clumped up, and they should always always always have Healing Rain on them. By the end of the fight you will see that this is where the majority of your healing comes from. 

I always have The Butcher targeted so I can see when he’s casting cleave. When you do this fight enough you’ll get in to a rhythm and will be able to predict when Cleave is about to go out. You should try to time it so that your chain heal goes out just as the cleave damage has hit. This way you’ll maximise healing time on your targets. Depending on how low they are, you might want to follow this up with another chain heal, or just throw out some single targets. 

I’m in the group that baits the bounding cleave. I use spirit link totem to help minimise some of the damage from this and get the group back up as quickly as possible. Rinse and repeat. It gets very chaotic and painful once he gets to 30% and Frenzy starts – your mana will disappear very quickly! So make sure you have enough to get through this. Using Ascendance can be very helpful for managing mana, as apposed to using it for a healing CD. Towards the end I will bring out my Fire Elemental (with Primal Elementalist talented) and make the most of empower to help flesh out your heals. 

Any other tips?

• make sure healing rain is down AT ALL TIMES
• riptide on cooldown
• time your chain heals to heal just as cleave damage has been taken
• conserve mana as much as possible to get through the Frenzy from 30% onwards
• Make sure you are stacked/spread out as per your raid leader’s requirements. Stacking incorrectly can have some nasty side effects and throw the rhythm of the fight out. 

This is one of my favourite bosses. That might be because my mastery kicks butt on this fight! But also, it’s simple and challenging all at once. The mechanics are very straight forward, they just need to be dealt with correctly, and dps needs to be kept alive 100% of the time. 

How are other finding this fight? Anything I’ve missed? 

Out guild’s first heroic kill of The Butcher